We use the word "love" but we have no more understanding of love than we do of anger or fear or jealousy or even joy, because we have seldom investigated what that state of mind is. What are the feelings we so quickly label as love? For many what is called love is not lovely at all but is a tangle of needs and desires, of momentary ecstasies and bewilderment. Moments of unity, of intense feelings of closeness, occur in a mind so fragile that the least squint or sideways glance shatters its oneness into a dozen ghostly paranoias.
-Steven Levine, Who Dies?
In George Lucas’ 1971 science-fiction film THX-1138, the greatest crime was to fall in love, an offense punishable by death. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, Winston Smith’s downfall begins with his romance with another prole, Julia. Throughout world literature, art and mythology, romantic love - with its secret longings and private intimacies - is often portrayed as problematic to the powerful.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell held that romantic love became respectable with the Renaissance, when family-arranged marriages fell into decline. In a 1986 interview, Campbell noted the coincidence that “the word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church,” a body that justified marriages “that were simply political and social in their character.”
Love is a state of mind that lies outside the jurisdiction of the temple, the marketplace and the government. It can undercut allegiances to status, wealth and privilege. To be in love is, in a sense, an unspoken form of protest of two hearts over any given authority.
Eros, Amor, Agape
Some years ago, a friend told me a story of running into someone he hadn’t seen since high school. She told him how she’d fallen in with a bad crowd in her teen years and ended up living in the States as a high-price call girl.
She told him that about half her clients broke down in her arms and cried. The encounters ended there. These men weren’t after sex, or even love necessarily. They hungered for momentary intimacy and the freedom to be vulnerable enough to receive it.
This anecdote is echoed by others, including Nicole Emma in this Tedx Talk. Recently, sex workers on Reddit shared their saddest customer requests from the job. Among the comments:
An elderly man would come in whenever he'd saved enough money to afford an hour or two. He didn't speak much but always had the kindest smile for me. All he wanted to do was hold me in his arms and sway gently to the music. Nothing else. After a couple of months, he shared with me that he used to do this with his wife before she died and that he misses the intimacy of their moments together.
In the Christian tradition, Eros is the desire of the flesh. Amor is the desire for the other. Agape is spiritual love, the love for the neighbour, the community, reflecting a desire to connect with a larger sense of purpose.
Many of the men in the Reddit anecdotes were seeking something related to these three states: compassion, mediated by the most primary expression of human connection, touch.
The Latin root for the word compassion is pati, which means ‘to suffer,’ and the prefix com, meaning ‘with.’ It literally means, “to suffer with.”
Compassion can extend to those we’ve never met and never will meet, and even to non-human creatures. Buddhism, and to a large degree the three monotheistic religions, set great stock on it. Yet compassion has been implicitly devalued in the theology of free-market economics, where freedom of choice and self-advancement are the prime movers of the market.
We’re promised that shareholder return, taking compassion’s place like a cuckoo’s egg, will hatch the market solutions to our problems. We just have to give it time. Strangely, officially-ballyhooed compassion rarely registers more than a blip on the public relations radar until its needed to sell a war - on poverty, on drugs, a man or a microbe. We’re always told the war has been engineered to protect us. And we always buy it. Every time.
Yet love and compassion have deep, non-monetizable roots. Great acts of selflessness are not unknown even among the unlikeliest people. In a 1986 interview, Bill Moyers asked Joseph Campbell about a report of a policeman in Hawaii who saved the life of a drowning man, while losing his own. Moyers wondered how it can be that one person gives his life so freely for that of a stranger.
Campbell responded by referring to an essay by the morose German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, in which he asks how it is that a human being can so participate in the peril and pain of another that without thought, spontaneously, he sacrifices his own life.
Schopenhauer’s answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and the other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according to Schopenhauer, the truth of your life.
Schopenhauer’s ideas were informed by his reading of eastern religions. The physicist Albert Einstein, a pantheist, said very much the same thing as Schopenhauer.
All very well and cosmic. But how does it connect back practically to the mundane world of embodied beings fumbling about in the thickets of romance, and the many shades of love - platonic, maternal and familial? Stevine Levine explains:
Unconditional love is the experience of being; there is no "I" and "other,' and anyone or anything it touches is experienced in love. You cannot unconditionally love someone. You can only be unconditional love. It is not a dualistic emotion. It is a sense of oneness with all that is. The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal. It is a feeling of unity. You don't love another, you are another. There is no fear because there is no separation.
With all the profitable forces of trickery and chaos raging across the world like wildfire, the greatest act of noncompliance is to find connection to the worlds beneath and past the "skin-encapsulated ego.” This is what makes true love so subversive, and real compassion so revolutionary; their power to bring together, heal, and find the universal in the particular.
I also have struggled with what this word love means but I have to confess I love my cat more than any human being in my life.
You got to the essence of love, which is its subversive and uncontrollable aspect. That's what makes it so scary, especially in the modern world where we seem increasingly preoccupied with control. Maybe only poets can express it in words...the rest of us just limp along using latin to make things a bit clearer...by the way, even the French satirist Houllebeq says it's the only thing that matters. I rather enjoy his dry incisive style.